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Where I Am Coming From
What I sought was a relationship
with God that was so compelling and vivid that I could never again doubt his existence or his love. I understand now that
humans can hope to escape doubt completely only in heaven. But God gave me the next best thing, ready access to him and a
faith that any separation from him is only temporary. He accomplished this with revelations that were personal and private,
and not shareable. The revelations were clear and powerful and extended over a long enough time that I could abandon fanaticism
and lead an outwardly normal life.
Christians from the beginning have spread the good news of Jesus by telling others
what great things God has done for them and then going on to say, “You, too, can share in these great things. Believe in
Jesus and accept him as your savior and you, too, will know this same salvation and be filled with his Spirit.” My message
is similar but different. I can point to Jesus as the incarnation of God and the hope of the world, but I cannot advise others
to go where I have gone.
Even so, all these years I have longed to be known as a man of God, to have my identity
in him, but I have been frustrated because I have not been able to share what God has done for me. Because God has shown
me great favor, I need in some way to let the world know. As long as I hold it in, I am not being true to myself, and I am
not making the sort of contribution to the community that has always resulted from powerful revelations of God.
God
is not an affirmative action, equal opportunity sort of person. He has never claimed that everyone is equal in his sight,
despite the fact that Christianity has verged on such a claim. The apostle Paul said, “You are all sons of God through faith
in Christ Jesus.... There is neither...slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians
3:28). Jesus himself said, “He who would be greatest among you must be the servant of all.”
Nevertheless, down through
time God’s distribution of his favor has been notoriously uneven, with some people getting much larger portions than others.
Paul at another time found himself flagrantly boasting to the Corinthians about his special revelations: “[I was] caught
up to the third heaven...to paradise...[and] heard inexpressible things, things that man is not permitted to tell.... To
keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given to me a thorn....” (2 Corinthians
12:2-7). So Paul was greatly favored, and he knew it, and most of the time he did his best not to flaunt it. Why? These
special things he experienced were personal and private, and they were not shareable. Only those who love Paul can honor
him for his claims of special revelations, but those who do not know him are more likely just to take offense.
There
are few things harder to bear in any religious community than spiritual one-upmanship, where one person claims some religious
experience that is impossible for others to verify, and a second person claims a more impressive experience equally impossible
to verify. Personal revelations of God can be real. Without them the Bible would never have been written. But unless they
contain details addressed specifically to other people, such as the revelations to the prophets, they are fundamentally unshareable.
If Christians did not make some effort to let others know about God’s work in their lives, however, religion would lose its
power. A guiding principle, one I am hoping to follow here, might be to tell others the details only if one is convinced
the sharing will benefit the others more than oneself.
Ultimately, in the realm of religion as in fields of human
endeavor it is not one’s private experiences that create value and confer status but what one contributes to the community.
A degree from a prestigious university can help a person get started in a career, but if performance does not follow, the
academic credentials come to mean little. Just as “faith without works is dead,” so personal revelations without a contribution
to the community are like dry winds on bare rock. In my own case I have had to trust that my revelations had a purpose beyond
their personal value to me, and that God would use me somewhere. Eventually.
Now, as a man of God who has been active
as a scientist for three decades, I think I finally have something to share with certain Christians that can be of value to
them. It is appropriate for me to lay bare my past as a religious fanatic in order to make clear where I am coming from,
and not to play the game of spiritual one-upmanship. What I say is not the fruit of some academic investigation or logical
deduction but is the fruit of living simultaneously over an extended period as a man of God and as an earth scientist. My
goal is not to create plausible hypotheses but to share personal convictions that, having developed in the crucible of the
modern world, should be of value to some.
All who write on religious topics owe it to the reader to make clear where
they are coming from. The directions of all forays into matters of religion, including higher criticism of the Bible, are
greatly influenced by the authors’ initial points of view and prejudices. Plausibility arguments have a place, but they should
be identified as such and not presented as ineluctable scientific deductions.
My own attitude towards the Bible originated
in my days as a fanatic, when I felt it was necessary to take every word as directly inspired divine truth. This position
was one of weakness: Inerrancy of the Bible was a crutch, and without it I would have fallen. Over the years I grew more
confident of God and was able to walk without the crutch. I still try to accept as literal, scientifically valid truth whatever
I can, but it has become obvious to me that parts of the Bible are true only in a restricted sense and, taken literally, are
not consistent with well-established scientific discoveries. It is some of these parts that I hope to supplement with concepts
that are congenial both to God and to science.
Finally, I need to make clear that what I say is not verbally inspired.
My relationship with God over the years has included very little communication from him in a verbal form, and none that was
for public consumption. What I have to say comes instead from a process of integration. My mind has been forced to make
sense of two radically different worlds. My answers from integrating are not final, but some fundamentals seem clear; and
these I judge to be worth sharing with Christians who might find them beneficial.
What a teacher teaches depends
strongly on the teacher’s experience. The dependence is less strong when the subject matter is, say, that of a standard,
low-level science course, but it is very strong when the subject is religion and the teacher is breaking new ground.
Martin
Luther’s rather extreme emphasis on salvation by grace alone, for example, was directly related to his overwhelming, inescapable
guilt feelings as a young man. His sense of inadequacy and guilt before God was too great for him ever to feel he could make
any contribution to his own salvation.
The apostle Paul’s strong emphasis on grace similarly was related to the mode
of his conversion to Christianity and his prior behavior. He went from being a dedicated persecutor of Christians to being
one of Jesus’ most ardent and effective advocates, all because of an act of God that abruptly revised his objectives against
what at the time was his better judgment.
In contrast, James the brother of Jesus felt comfortable emphasizing the
importance of good works no doubt at least partly because of his privileged position as a close relative of Jesus. While
not supportive of Jesus’ ministry as it was going on, he was probably not a terribly vigorous opponent, either; otherwise
his emphasis would have been more strongly on grace as well.
My own teaching is equally colored by my past, and,
I suspect, is likely to be less seriously misinterpreted with knowledge of my personal history than without it. So this chapter
will be autobiographical. Apart from the value for understanding my position, the story is one that ought to be told.
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In
sharp contrast to Martin Luther and perhaps partly because of him, I have never really felt guilty before God, never truly
in need of confession. As the oldest of five sons of a Lutheran pastor, and his third child, I have always felt that God
was on my side. As early as elementary school days I recall concluding that God was so faithful in answering my prayers that
my praying gave me an unfair advantage. I pretty much stopped praying then in order to find out what I could accomplish on
my own, without God’s intervention.
More important than this belief that God was on my side was an even less rational
or justifiable belief, but a belief nonetheless that dominated my personality throughout my childhood and into my second year
of college. This belief was that I was destined to be the greatest person in human history. Where such a belief came from
I have no idea. Perhaps everyone is born with a sense of personal grandeur and superiority but is soon forced by conflicts
with others to abandon it. For years I found no one who admitted to having such a belief as a child, but recently a talented
young Russian woman told me that she had felt that way about herself and thought everyone did.
Whatever the prevalence
of such irrational beliefs, this one permeated my being and affected much of my thinking. As a young adolescent, for example,
while I occasionally daydreamed about achievements in the classroom, in a social setting or on the playing field, I more persistently
daydreamed about single-handedly resolving the looming conflict between the US and the Soviet Union and in that way as well
as in others of becoming universally acknowledged as superior to all other people.
When I was a bit older I recall
difficulties in reconciling my belief with IQ test scores. In those days I didn’t know what my IQ was, but I was well aware
that others had quicker minds than mine, and I assumed they had higher IQ’s. At that time the conventional wisdom as I received
it was that achievement was proportional to IQ and that the greatest achievers inevitably would be those with the higher IQ’s.
How could I be the greatest person in history if my IQ was not higher than everyone else’s? This question drove me to spend
many hours of many days over a period of years marshaling arguments against the correlation of achievement with IQ. I recall
gathering materials and writing an essay on the subject for my own use.
Recently, upon reading an early draft of
this book, my older sister, Lois, was more than a little amused by these remarks and told me that, with a score of 198 out
of a possible 200, I’d come in second-highest on a standard IQ test administered by our elementary school. At the time she
had been employed by the school to tally the test scores. I recall her admonishing me then to achieve great things because
of my high score, but with average being 100, 140 was as high as I could bring myself to imagine. Knowing the actual score
as a child would have spared me a lot of concern and effort, but I would still have wondered why so many classmates seemed
to have quicker minds than my own.
Throughout that period nothing could shake my conviction that I was destined to
be greatest. The only question was how. What did it mean to be greatest? It had something to do with influence; I was sure
of that. But in what way does one exert ultimate influence? For a while I thought that the route lay through writing, and
I started working on a novel in my mid-teens.
Then came what I regarded at the time as an interlude. My parents
had always wanted me to follow in my father’s footsteps and become a Lutheran pastor. I was an obedient son and could not
resist them, even though I did not see how one could become greatest by being a Lutheran pastor. But I went along. This
meant attending a Lutheran high school in Portland, Oregon, away from home, which at that time was south of Seattle in Auburn,
Washington.
The high school was combined with a two-year college that pre-ministerial students like myself attended
after finishing three high-school years. Things came to a head for me in my second year of college. I had a heavy course
load and at the same time put in many hours each week as editor of the school newspaper. I hardly ever got to bed before
one or two in the morning. At the same time the Christian environment of the school was beginning to get through to me.
I started thinking, “If God really exists, what does it mean to be the greatest person in history? God by definition
is greater than any man. Besides that, God ultimately would be the one to pronounce judgment on who was or was not greatest.”
The logic became more and more compelling: If God exists, a man cannot be greatest except somehow through God. Consequently,
despite my busy schedule, I resolved to do something that few such pre-ministerial students ever did, and that was to read
the Bible through from cover to cover. This course of reading I undertook in the small hours of every morning.
Shortly
before Christmas break, as I was reading the prophecy of Jeremiah, it happened. What exactly? To this day it has been by
far the most profound disruption of my life; and a most peculiar thing about it is that nothing tangible ever happened. Jeremiah’s
tone convinced me that he really was getting some kind of message from God. While I was sitting there wondering exactly what
Jeremiah had experienced, I felt powerfully, unmistakably the presence of God with me in the room. And the apples in my cart
started falling and bouncing everywhere.
Until that moment God had been important in my life. He was in one of the
compartments of my life that I could access or not access, depending on how I felt. Precisely at that moment God escaped
my compartment, demolished what was left of my other compartments and just sat there. My life was in total disarray. How
can I describe it? God had gone from being a concept I controlled to being a person I could not ignore. And that change
changed everything.
I was at the same time elated and terrified. Elated because the one I had been seeking had become
a real person that I could communicate with. How the communication took place I had no idea. There was nothing my five senses
could detect, but I was as convinced that he was there as I was convinced that I was there. Terrified, primarily because
of the stark discrepancy between God as a person and God as my conception: If a human could know God in this new way, why
wasn’t the world outside radically different? The sum of my experiences to that point strongly suggested that God was there
but could not be known intimately as a person. He was operating the world, but as if by remote control. If God could be
known in this new way, why wasn’t the whole world proclaiming that fact?
This encounter with God the person radically
changed my behavior. I continued to keep up with course work and my duties as editor of the school paper, but I took on two
new activities that soon occupied the bulk of my time. The first was increased devotion to Bible reading. I quickly completed
reading the Bible through once and then started over again. The Bible reading was coupled with and part of an intense effort
to seek an enhanced personal relationship with God. It was also an important part of the background for my second new activity,
which was to try to convert everyone to the kind of personal knowledge of God that I now had.
What a tangled mess
that activity proved to be! Here I was at a Christian college trying desperately to convince people that they didn’t really
know God but that they must know him in order to be saved. It was this activity that brought me up against hard realities
of human nature. Several claimed they did have personal knowledge of God, but I refused to believe them on the grounds that,
if they really knew God as I knew him, they would be as fanatical about proclaiming him as I was.
Ultimately, after
several months, my missionary work left me simply frustrated. A few people seemed to catch fire in a way I found acceptable,
but overall I could see that the kind of change that I felt had to happen, a change that would leave the whole world proclaiming
God and nothing else, was not going to happen.
My parents had moved to southwest Idaho, and I spent the next two
summers there working on farms and in a corn cannery and trying to figure out how to improve my relationship with God. The
missionary activity I had pretty much given up out of frustration. I turned instead to seeking God on my own. I had come
to know God, but the knowledge was too partial, too intermittent, too incomplete to satisfy me. Life in many respects was
good, but from the spiritual side it was largely frustration. I continued my pre-ministerial education, the upper two years
of college, at a Lutheran school especially created for the purpose in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Soon after beginning my
second year at the Fort Wayne college, my frustration with the inadequacy of my knowledge of God came to a head. I was in
a state of tranquil desperation. Since coming to know God personally that December of 1956 I had tried fasting a number of
times, at least twice for periods of several days, and found that it seemed to bring me closer to God. So in the Indiana
autumn of 1958 I made up my mind: I would have a satisfactory, lasting relationship with God, or I would die seeking it.
He was there. I knew that as well as I knew I existed. But for reasons I could not explain, our relationship was intermittent
and unsatisfying. If our relationship could not be better than this, I thought, I would rather be dead.
At first
I decided to go without food and water both, but after a while I started getting bad headaches, so I changed my mind and drank
water. Headaches were counterproductive. I tried to keep my fasting secret, but after four weeks or so the dean of students
had become aware through fellow students that I was not taking regular meals and summoned me. He explained that the school
could not accept responsibility for my fasting, so it was necessary for me either to state a time in the near future when
I was going to stop or leave the school. Since at that point I had not made up my mind how long my fasting would last, and
I had certainly not yet reached my objective, I had to leave. The dean notified my parents that I was mentally ill and was
coming home.
As to my “mental illness,” my own evaluation, for what it is worth, was that my mind had never been
clearer. My grades in course work were never higher, and my perceptions of the world about me were vibrantly clear.
My
parents were crushed, especially my mother, because I had always been an obedient son, and her hopes for my career as a pastor
had always been high. So when she saw me arrive home emaciated, she was anxious and concerned for my welfare and, above all,
hopeful I would stop fasting as soon as possible.
From my own point of view the fasting was beneficial, because my
relationship with God was improving, but the improvement was rather less than I had hoped. I continued fasting for a time
and finally decided that this particular period of fasting was not going to give the final answer. For one thing, there had
been too many disruptions and confrontations. I had to confront first the school officials, then my parents. And there were
the intrusions from academic course work and the long train ride from Indiana to Idaho.
What I would do, I decided,
was to call it off arbitrarily after 40 days, a number that corresponds to periods of fasting by Moses, Elijah and Jesus,
and take it up again at a later date, alone in the deserts of southwest Idaho, until I either had come into a satisfactory
relationship with God or had died.
My fast lasted exactly forty-two days instead of forty, for a reason some will
find bizarre. Two days into my fast I absentmindedly chewed off a hangnail on my finger and swallowed it while I was studying
for some course. Initially I felt that act of eating violated my fast, so I felt I should start my count over at that point.
In reality, of course, when a person fasts, the person’s body continually consumes itself anyway, so I had no legitimate reason
to regard the eating of my own hangnail as a violation of my fast. But the incident illustrates the degree of my fanatical,
legalistic self-discipline at the time.
I am not dead, and I did not give up on God, so I must have come into a satisfactory
relationship with him. How did it happen? Did God note how long I went without food and feel sorry for me? Or did he decide
I had now earned his favor?
As I see it now, the fasting in itself had little direct effect on the positive outcome.
The fasting clearly helped indirectly, however, because it got me expelled from school so that I escaped all the pressures
and concerns of life and wound up living off my parents in southwest Idaho with no defined responsibilities.
Within
a short time after I had resumed eating, God satisfied my desire for him over an extended period in ways that exceeded my
most far-fetched hopes. His love for me made a second period of fasting unnecessary.
A few Christians at that time
and since have admonished me that God is accessible and can be known readily apart from acts of personal discipline such as
fasting. My response can only be that their way apparently was fine for them, but such a way was not adequate for me. Eventually,
on occasion, I decided to explain my late-teen encounters with God in traditional Christian terms as a special call from God.
This explanation has allowed me to think of myself, if I so desired, as a genuine Christian during the period before the call.
The purpose of such a call, however, has not been very clear.
Why did I dwell so long on my conviction that I was
destined to be the greatest person in human history? After God first showed himself to me, that conviction seemed to become
irrelevant. In reality it served important purposes. First, it had a major role in stimulating me to begin a serious search
for God. Second, after God found me, that conviction left me with such a positive image of myself that I was free to reject
all constraints and strictures of human society and civilization to strike out on my own to seek a better relationship with
God. If I had not had the confidence from that positive self image, I probably would have been unable to seek God in the
way I did without getting someone else’s concurrence—permission, as it were, from a parental figure. And no one, of course,
would have given any such permission.
It is easy and common for men to reject constraints of human civilization when
they are in a mode of rebellion, but it is difficult and rare as long as they remain obedient sons. At that stage I was far
more the obedient son than the rebellious child. But I was confident enough of myself to recognize when I had found the “pearl
of great price” and to reject all else in my effort to obtain it.
Two years later, having lost my student deferment
from the draft, I found myself a private in the US Army. I was stationed in Germany, in a heavy artillery battery, two-and-a-half
years. Not long after discharge, partly at my mother’s insistence, I returned to school at Valparaiso University, a Lutheran
institution in Indiana that accepted all my previous college credits, so that I graduated with a BA in English in only one
year.
I then took up physics at the University of Idaho. A part of my motive for jumping from English to physics
was that I wanted to test my religious experience against the inherent skepticism of scientific analysis: Could I perhaps
find some way of rejecting the whole experience as some kind of self-deception once I became proficient in science? I graduated
from the U of Idaho with the MS in solid state physics in 1969. My grades were such that I was honored with memberships in
Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi. Finally, I earned the PhD in high energy/cosmic ray physics from the University of Michigan
in 1972. Most of the time since then I was employed by a major oil company to do research in geophysics.
Since the
forty-two days in 1958 I have not fasted, nor have I had any inclination to do so. My professional colleagues as a rule probably
regard me as one of the more conservative geophysicists and might guess that the most unconventional thing I’ve ever done
is to marry a Chinese woman. Many would probably also guess that I am an atheist, partly because I have largely been unable
to share what God has done for me. This book will change any such perceptions.
Many Christians have come to God
out of anguish because of personal loss such as the death of someone close. Their testimony tells how God provides the only
solution for human frailty. Others come to God out of profound guilt and conviction of personal sinfulness. They emphasize
God as the only source of forgiveness. I came to God neither begging for help nor pleading for mercy but as a healthy young
man intent on self-improvement.
Because of these initial conditions my “conversion to God,” assuming it was a conversion
and not a call, does not fit well some of the standard Christian formulas, and my language may not be as self-deprecating
as some might like. Lutherans and some other Christians traditionally formulate reconciliation with God as a two-step process:
A person first becomes convinced of sin and inadequacy before God, and then by confessing sins and professing faith that Jesus
has overcome the power of sin he receives forgiveness and reconciliation.
This formula has been largely irrelevant
for me because sin and forgiveness were never important issues. The major issues after I came to know God were, first, who
he was and, second, what kind of relationship with him was possible. Barriers to the relationship as I came to understand
them were far more consequential than my personal sins. The whole world, it seemed, was conspiring to persuade me that God
did not even exist! The manner in which God overcame these barriers to our relationship has made my testimony to him to be
one of confidence in his love and conviction that I am of great value to him.
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